Nine-plus years of being "PL", as he calls it, have had their widely reported frustrations for Andrew Motion. But he's very pleased indeed with one aspect of his tenure: the establishment of the online Poetry Archive, collecting a considerable library of poets recorded reading their work. It's not a project he could have raised the money for without his PL's status, and he's understandably chuffed with the results.

Motion makes a persuasive case that even when poets are not natural public speakers or sonorous readers (see TS Eliot's elocution-exercise reading of The Waste Land ) we can still learn a great deal from listening to them. Lines that look awkward on the page often fall into place when we hear them spoken; and hearing them satisfies what he calls "a very primitive appetite for like sounds, rhythm and mystery (or nonsense, if you like). People turn to poetry for weddings and funerals, but the children in the corner of the playground jumping up and down are to some extent responding to the same thing".

The best proof of this appetite - and one that AM is very happy to point towards - is the Poetry Archive's readership: 1m hits a month, 125,000 unique users. That's not a bad figure for any website; for poetry it's little short of spectacular. "It blows out of the water the idea that there's no audience for poetry and that it's going the way of clog dancing," Motion says.

He'll be hoping for an even more impressive hit-rate following today's introduction of a raft of new recordings of American poets - a tradition that seems to have largely gone missing for English readers since the second world war.

If Motion is chirpy about the Poetry Archive, he also sounds distinctly chipper about casting off the royal hallmark from his work on May 1 2009. Although he says his remarks about the sorrows of a PL were written rather larger than they were spoken, he does confess that the "antiquated, quaint" job left him blocked for some years. (This barren spell was followed by something of a damburst of creativity, on show in a new collection due next year.)

He doesn't go as far as saying that the verse for the Windsors was rubbish (although he concedes that the rather pitiful attempt to rap for Prince Williams' 21st was "not my natural dance move"). But he does say that "it was always going to be difficult for a lyric poet who relies on strong feeling to produce work to order. It's the best I could do - if there's an element of willed-ness, is it surprising?" Be that as it may, he has no plans to add his rapping to the Poetry Archive.